Stephen C. Rose, John F. Buckwalter and Robert J. Woodhall
Dave Chappell has spent his career working on waterflood developments and operations in Brunei, Oman, Thailand, and Australia. In 2003, he became one of the founding members of Shell’s central waterflood team tasked with improving waterflood performance across the entire Shell waterflood portfolio, based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He went on to manage that group from 2008 until his retirement in 2018. Since then, he has worked as an independent consultant in the waterflood arena.
1. Background 1
2. Introduction 2
3. Injection System 2
3.1 Seawater Injection 3
3.1.1 Seawater Intake 5
3.1.2 Filtration 10
3.1.3 Deoxygenation 15
3.1.4 Pumping 22
3.1.5 Sulfate Removal 22
3.1.6 Chemical Injection 26
3.1.7 Subsea Raw-Seawater Injection 27
3.1.8 Low-Salinity-Flood Facilities 29
3.1.9 Mobile Water-Injection System 32
3.2 Produced-Water Injection 33
3.2.1 Oil Removal 35
3.2.2 Solids Removal 45
3.2.3 Mixed Produced-Water/Seawater Injection 51
3.2.4 Onshore Treatment Processes 52
3.2.5 Offshore Treatment Processes 55
3.3 Chemical-Injection System 56
3.3.1 Process Chemicals and Injection Location 59
3.4 Injection Distribution and Subsea Injection Systems 61
3.4.1 Injection Flowlines 64
3.5 Subsea Separation and Injection 67
4. Production 70
4.1 Dehydration 70
4.1.1 Emulsions 71
4.1.2 Demulsification 72
4.1.3 Coalescence 74
4.1.4 Bulk Separation 75
4.1.5 Dehydration Equipment Options 76
4.1.6 Improvements to Existing Processes 80
5. Operations 83
5.1 Organization 83
5.2 Commissioning and Startup 84
5.2.1 Flushing Injection Flowlines 87
5.3 Operating Philosophy 88
5.4 Well Testing 89
5.5 Injection-Water Quality 92
5.6 Biological Control in Injection Flowlines 95
5.7 Mature-Waterflood Operations 95
5.8 Waterflood System Maintenance 96
5.9 Corrosion Management 97
5.10 Load Shedding 97
5.11 Cost of Water 97
5.12 Water-Injection Uptime 98
5.13 H2S Management 101
5.14 System and Equipment Troubleshooting 102
5.14.1 Seawater Treatment System 102
5.14.2 Produced-Water Treatment System 106
6. Conclusions 108
7. Nomenclature 108
8. References 110
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Waterflooding: Facilities and Operations by downloading the PDF below.
